Today, SixXS is shutting down. After providing IPv6 connectivity via tunnels for many years, the people behind SixXS decided that it is now the job of each ISP to provide native IPv6 connectivity. While I fully agree with their sentiment, I still think that they leave a gap - not just because some ISPs might still not provide native IPv6, but because of the design of IPv6 itself. Just to make this clear: I do not blame the people and companies behind SixXS in any way. I am very grateful for the service they have provided for so many years and perfectly understand why they made this decision.

In order to understand why SixXS leaves a gap, one first has to understand how IPv4 and IPv6 are typically deployed and how they differ. It is safe to say that most local networks use private IPv4 addresses (as defined in Kappa Women's 3036GI0901 Black Polyester TShirt). The only notable exception to this rule are large organizations that started to use the Internet so early that they still got large allocations of global IPv4 addresses (most universities and research institutes belong to this group).

The use of private IPv4 addresses for the internal network made it necessary to use network address translation (NAT) when connecting to the public Internet. Everyone involved with network administration knows from experience that NAT can be a headache, but due to its ubiquitous use in IPv4, most network applications expect it and know how to deal with it.

With IPv6, one of the main motivations for NAT disappeared: The address space is now large enough to provide a unique, public address for each device on the planet. This means that IPv6 was designed without NAT in mind, aiming to provide true end-to-end connectivity. However, this leaves us with one question: How does each device get its IPv6 address?

The idea in the design of IPv6 is that each network has its public IPv6 prefix (defining the first 64 bits of the IPv6 address) and that a device uses this prefix for generating an IPv6 address. Obviously, this only answers one part of the question. One question remains: How does each network get its IPv6 prefix?

The answer to this question is much more difficult. In general, one could say that each network gets its IPv6 prefix from the router that provides connectivity to the outside world. That router in turn will most likely get its (shorter) prefix from another router, and so on. This has been implemented with Kappa Women's 303WCK0932 Black Polyester Bodysuit (DHCPv6 PD).

The ideas is that you get an IPv6 prefix from your ISP and your Internet router will delegate slightly longer prefixes to each of the routers in your network which in turn will provide the prefixes to your devices. So everything should be great, right? Wrong. As the address of each device depends on the prefix assigned by your ISP, the address of each device will change when your ISP decides to change that prefix. Some ISPs (like my ISP, Deutsche Telekom), will actually change your IPv6 prefix periodically. Some ISPs (including Deutsche Telekom) might offer to provide you with a fixed prefix for a (significant) surcharge, but even that will not solve your problems completely. As soon as you decide to switch ISPs, all of your addresses are going to change, which means that you have to update your internal DNS, change the configuration of your firewalls, etc.

This is why the services provided by SixXS are still useful, even if an ISP provides native IPv6 connectivity. When using a tunnel, you can switch your ISP, but take your IPv6 addresses with you. In theory, there is a better way than using a tunnel: You could get your own IPv6 address space and have your ISP route it to you. The first part is actually not as hard as it sounds: There are providers (in Europe Kappa Women's 303WGQ0974 White Cotton TShirt members) which will happily assist you with the registration process for a small few (I have seen such offers for only 10 EUR per month plus a one time fee). The second part however is quite hard: Yes, there are ISPs which will route traffic for your address space to you, but this typically means that you will have to get the expensive kind of Internet connectivity. At least I know of now DSL or cable provider that will route your own address space. This means that using PI addresses is not affordable for most individuals and small companies.

Effectively, this means that the technical standards provide solutions, but they are not feasible for many users. So the question is: Which alternatives do exist? With IPv4, using private addresses solved this problem and in IPv6 there is something very similar to private addresses: Unique local addresses (ULAs) are definded in Kappa Women's 304I700914 Pink Polyester TShirt for specifically this purpose. By using such addresses, one can have fixed addresses in a private network without having to rely on any external entity.

There are two ways how ULAs may be deployed. Each local network can have both a ULA and a global prefix (the latter one being assigned by prefix delegation) or one can use ULAs exclusively. The first solution sounds more reasonable: ULAs can be used for internal communication, but each device still has a global address so that it can communicate with the outside world. Unfortunately, such a setup causes a lot of problems in my experience: There are many applications (in particular in Windows networks) that discover addresses automatically, and some of the internal communication will end up using the volatile global addresses instead of using the permanent ULAs. This means that you will still experience problems when the externally assigned prefix changes. In addition to that, your internal firewalls will have to deal with changing prefixes.

For this reason, the best approach in my experience is using ULAs exclusively. The main disadvantage of this solution is that now we again have to use NAT in order to provide connectivity with the Internet. Originally, NAT was not even specified for IPv6, but this gap has been closed by Kappa Women's 304I7I0903 White Polyester Sweatshirt. In the case of IPv6, network prefix translation (NPT) is sufficient because there are enough addresses. This means that each ULA will be mapped to one global address and the other way round. It also means that UDP or TCP port numbers are not touched by the translation mechanism.

I adapted this scheme about a year ago, when SixXS first announced that they were going to discontinue their service. I described the details of the setup in my wiki. So far, it has been working very smoothly, with one notable exception: In many cases, IPv4 seems to be preferred when a host only has a ULA. This means that most communication will still use IPv4 and IPv6 is only going to be used when a hostname only resolves to an IPv6 address.

Apart from that, their might be issues with applications that use more than a single connection. RFC 6296 says:

End-to-end reachability is preserved, although the address used
"inside" the edge network differs from the address used "outside"
the edge network. This has implications for application referrals
and other uses of Internet layer addresses.

Most IPv4 applications have developed techniques that work around these issues. Only the future will show if IPv6 applications will adapt the same techniques.

Last but not least, RFC 7157 describes how it might be possible to make hosts work with several addresses using different prefixes. If this RFC were to be adopted by the operating systems and applications, it might be possible to use ULAs and global addresses in parallel. Until then, the source address selection rules as described by Kappa Women's 304LVZ0001 White Polyester Top unfortunately are not sufficient to make such a scenario work reliably, so NPT seems to be the best choice for now.

but the file in the repository has the expected size, a caching proxy (e.g. Apt-Cacher-NG) might be at fault. This can happen when the package in the repository has been changed instead of releasing a new package with a new version number. This will typically not happen for the official repositories, but it might happen for third-party repositories.

In this case, there are only two solutions: Bypass the proxy or remove the old file from the proxy's cache. In the case of Apt-Cacher-NG, this can be achived by going to the web interface, checking the “Validate by file name AND file directory (use with care),” and “then validate file contents through checksum (SLOW), also detecting corrupt files,” options and clicking “Start Scan and/or Expiration”. This scan should detect the broken packages, which can then be selected by checking “Tag” next to each package and subsequently deleted by clicking “Delete selected files”.

KAVU Women's Pretty Poncho Sweater

Icinga 2.x offers a cluster mode which (from an administrator's point of view) is one of the most important features introduces with the 2.x release. Using the cluster feature, check commands can be executed on satellite nodes or even the complete scheduling of checks can be delegated to other nodes, while still keeping the configuration in a single place.

In order to enable secure communication within the cluster, Icinga 2 uses a public key infrastructure (PKI). This PKI can be managed with the icinga2 pki commands. However, there is no command for generating a CRL. For this reason, it is necessary to use the openssl ca command for generating a CRL. I have documented the steps necessary for generating a CRL Karen Kane Womens BarBack Credver Top Blouse.

Funnily, it seems like no one has used a CRL in Icinga 2 so far. I know this, because up to today, Icinga 2 has a bug that makes it impossible to load a CRL. Luckily, yours truly already fixed this bug and this bugfix is going to be included in the next Icinga 2 release.

I find it strange that obviously no one is using CRLs, because Icinga 2 uses a very long validity period when generating certificates (15 years), so it is quite likely that at some point a node is decommissioned and thus the corresponding certificate shall be removed.

The arcticle is already about four months old, so it might look outdated regarding the latest developments. However, after reading it, I am pessimistic about the current attempts to establish peace and fear that violence will return soon.

KB Ladies Shoulder Bag Genuine Leather Gorgeous

Like most modern operating systems, Linux has a page cache. This means that when reading from or writing to a file, the data is actually cached in the system’s memory, so that subsequent read requests can be served much faster, without having to access the non-volatile storage.

This is an extremely useful facility, which has a huge impact on system performance. For typical workloads, a significant amount of data is used repeatedly and caching this data reduces the latency dramatically. For example, imagine that every time you ran “ls”, the executable would actually be read from the hard disk. This would undoubtedly make the interactive experience much less responsive.

Unfortunately, there is a downside to how Linux caches file-system data: As long as there is free system memory, the caching is a no-brainer and simply caching everything works perfectly. After some time however, the system memory will be used completely and the kernel has to decide how to free memory in order to cache I/O data. Basically, Linux will evict old data from the cache and even move process data to the swap area in order to make space for data newly arriving in the cache. In most cases, this makes sense: If data has not been used for some time (even data that is not from a disk but belongs to a process which simply has not needed it in some time), it makes sense to evict it from the cache or put it into the swap area so that the fast memory can be used for fresh data that is more likely to be needed again soon. Most times, these heuristics work great, but there is one big exception: Processes that read or write a lot of data, but only do so once.

For example, imagine a backup process. A backup process will read nearly all data stored on disk (and maybe write it to an archive file), but caching the data from this read or write operations does not make a lot of sense because it is not very likely to be accessed again soon (at least not more likely than if the backup process did not run at all). However, the Linux page cache will still cache that data and move other data out of memory. Now, accessing that data again will result in slow read requests from the hardware, effectively slowing the system down, sometimes to a point that is worse than if the page cache had been disabled completely.

For a long time, I never thought about this problem. In retrospect, systems sometimes seemed slow after running a backup, but I never connected the dots until recently I started to see a problem that looked weird at first: Every night, I got an e-mail from the Icinga monitoring system warning me about the swap space on two (very similar) systems running extremely low. First, I expected that some nightly maintenance problem might simply need a lot of memory (I recently had installed a software upgrade on these systems), so I assigned more memory to the virtual machines. I expected that the amount of free swap space would increase by the amount of extra memory assigned, but it did not. The swap space was still used almost completely. Therefore, I looked at the memory consumption while the problem was present, and the result was astonishing: Both memory and swap were virtually fully used, but about 90 percent of the memory was actually used by the page cache, not by any process.

Investigating the problem closer revelealed that the high usage of swap space always occurred shortly after the nightly backup process started running. To be absolutely sure, I manually started the process during the day and I could immediately see the page cache and swap usage growing rapidly. It was clear that the backup process reading a lot of data was responsible for the problem. If you think about it, this is not the kernel’s fault: It simply cannot know that the data will not be needed again and moving other data out of the way is actually counter productive.

So everything that is needed to fix this kind of problem is a way to tell the kernel “please do not cache the data that I read, I will not need it again anyway”. While this sounds simple, it actually is a huge problem with current kernel releases.

There is no way to tell the kernel “do not cache the data accessed by this process”. In fact, there are only four ways for influencing the caching behavior that I am aware of:

The page cache can be disabled globally for the time of running the backup process. While it might alleviate the impact of the problem, it is still not desirable because the page cache actually is useful and disabling it will have a negative impact on system performance. However, during the backup process, disabling the page cache might still result in better performance than not doing anything at all.

Some suggest mounting the file-system with the “sync” flag. However, this will only circumvent the page cache for write requests, not for read requests. It also has very negative impacts on performance, so I only list it here because it is suggested by some people.

The files can be opened with the O_DIRECT flag. This tells the kernel that I/O should bypass the caches. Unfortunately, using O_DIRECT has a lot of side effects. In particular, the size and offset of the memory buffer used for I/O operations has to match certain alignment restrictions that depend on the Kernel version used and the file-system type. There is no API for querying these restrictions, so one can only choose alignment to a rather large size and hope that it is sufficient. Of couse, this also means that simply modifying the code of an application that opens a file is not sufficient. Every piece of code that reads from or writes to a file has to be changed so that it matches the alignment restrictions. This definitely is not an easy task, so using O_DIRECT is more of a theoretical approach.

Last but not least, there is the posix_fadvise function. This function allows a program in user space to tell the kernel how it is going to use a file (e.g. read it sequentially), so that the kernel can optimize things like the file-system cache. There are two flags that can be passed to this function which sound particularly promising: According to the Karen Kane Womens Contrast Tie Top, the POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE flag specifies that “the specified data will be accessed only once” and the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED flag specifies that “the specified data will not be accessed in the near future”.

So it sounds like posix_fadvise can solve the problem and all we need to do is find a way to tell the program (tar in my case) to call it. As it turns out, there even is a small tool called “Karen Kane Womens Crushed Maxi Skirt Skirt” that acts as a wrapper around arbitrary programs and uses the LD_PRELOAD mechanism to catch attempts to open a file and adds POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE right after opening the file.

This would be the perfect solution if the Linux kernel actually cared about POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE. Unfortunately, till this day, it simply ignores this flag. In 2011, there was a Karen Kane Womens Drape Front Pocket Sweater that tried to add support for this flag to the kernel, but it never made it into the mainline kernel (the reasons are unknown to me).

Actually, the nocache tool is aware of this and adds a workaround: When closing the file, it calls posix_fadvise with the POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED flag. It has to do this when closing the file (instead of when opening it) because POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED only removes data from the page cache, it does not prevent it from being added to the page cache.

So I installed nocache, and wrapped the call to tar with it, expecting that this would finally solve the problem. Surprisingly, it did not. At first, it seemed like the page cache was filling less rapidly, but after a while, everything looked quite like before. I tried to add the “-n” parameter to nocache, telling it to call posix_fadvise multiple times (the documentation suggested to do so), but this did not help either.

After giving this some more thought, I realized why: Using POSIX_FADV_DONTNEED when closing the file works great when working with many small or medium-sized files. For large files, however, it does not work. By the time it is called, all of the file has already been put into the page cache, causing the same problems as when many small files are read without nocache. This means that posix_fadvise has to be called repeatedly while reading from the file to ensure that the amount of data cached never grows too large. While there are only a few API calls for opening files, there are ways for reading from a file (e.g. memory-mapped I/O) that nocache simply cannot catch. This means that the only solution is actually patching the program that is reading or writing data.

This is why I created a Karen Kane Womens Embroidered Dress Casual Dress for Karen Kane Womens Embroidered Tasseltie Top Blouse version 1.29. This patch calls posix_fadvise after reading each block of data and thus ensures that the page cache is never polluted by tar. Unfortunately, this patch is not portable, nor does it provide a command-line argument for enabling or disabling this behavior, so it is not really suitable for inclusion into the general source code of GNU tar. The patch only takes care of not polluting the file-system cache when reading files. It does not do so when writing them, but for me this is sufficient because in my backup script, tar writes to the standard output anyway.

When using this patched version of tar, the memory problems disappear completely. This makes me confident that the change is sufficient, so I am going to use this patched version of tar for all systems that I backup with tar. Unfortunately, I use Bareos for the backup of most systems, so I will have to find a solution for that software, too. Maybe we are lucky, and support for POSIX_FADV_NOREUSE will finally be added to Linux at some point in the future, but until then patching the software involved in the backup process seems like the only feasible way to go.

Keaac Women's Fashion Smooth Down Jacket Coat

After upgrading from Zimbra ZCS 7.8.0 on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Zimbra ZCS 7.8.1 on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, backups where suddenly not working any longer. Instead of the usual “SUCCESS” e-mail, I would get two e-mails about a failure, both essentially containing the error message “Error occurred: system failure: LDAP backup failed: system failure: exception during auth {RemoteManager: myzimbrahost.example.com->[email protected]:22}”.

As it turns out, this was caused by an SSH authentication problem. Zimbra was still using an old DSA key for SSH, which is not supported in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS any longer (at least it is deactivated by default). The fix is simple: After running zmsshkeygen and zmupdateauthekys (both must be run as the zimbra user), Zimbra uses an RSA key-pair and authentication works again.

No subnet declaration for ovsbr0p1 (no IPv4 addresses).
** Ignoring requests on ovsbr0p1. If this is not what
you want, please write a subnet declaration
in your dhcpd.conf file for the network segment
to which interface ovsbr0p1 is attached. **

Not configured to listen on any interfaces!

If you think you have received this message due to a bug rather
than a configuration issue please read the section on submitting
bugs on either our web page at www.isc.org or in the README file
before submitting a bug. These pages explain the proper
process and the information we find helpful for debugging..

exiting.

Obviously the problem was that the DHCP server was started before the network interface ovsbr0p1 (the primary network interface of the host) was brought up. I guessed that this problem was somehow related to the migration from Upstart to Systemd. Still, it was strange because the isc-dhcp-server.service was configured to be started after the network-online.target.

I could not figure out why Systemd though that the network-online.target had been reached before the interface was configured completely, but I found a simple workaround: I added a file /etc/systemd/system/isc-dhcp-server.service.d/retry.conf with the following content:

[Service]
Restart=on-failure
RestartSec=15

This means that the first start of the DHCP server will still fail most of the time, but Systemd will retry 15 seconds later and typically the network interface will be online by then (if it is not, Systemd will try again another 15 seconds later).

After upgrading a virtual machine from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS, I was getting weird problems with the network configuration. The network would still be brought up, but scripts that were specified in /etc/network/interfaces would not be run when the corresponding interface was brought up.

The logfile /var/log/syslog would contain messages like "ifup: interface eth0 already configured". On other VMs that had also been updated from Ubuntu 14.04 LTS and uses a similar network configuration, this problem would not appear.

I found the solution to this problem in the Ubuntu Forums: There was a file /etc/udev/rules.d/85-ifupdown.rules that caused problems with the network initialization. After deleting this file, the problems went away. I guess that this file was present in a rather old release of Ubuntu and thus the problem only appears when a system has previously been upgraded from that release of Ubuntu.

KeHuiYing Sexy Strapless Bikini Girl High Waisted Swimsuits for Women

Recently, I got funny issues with group policies on Windows Server 2012 R2. These issues manifested themselves with the following symptoms:

When trying to edit a group policy, the Group Policy Management tool would present an error like “Group Policy Error: You do not have permission to perfrom this operation. Details: Access is denied.” The Group Policy Management Editor would still open, but the group policy would not be displayed.

Sometimes, the group policy editor would open, but when trying to navigate through the tree, it would display an error message like “Error (0x80070005) occurred parsing file. Access is denied.” I believe that this error is only present when using the Karen Kane Womens Tuscan Tile Contrast Hem Top Blouse for administrative templates.

The event log would contain messages like: “The processing of Group Policy failed. Windows attempted to read the file \\domain\sysvol\domain\Policies\uuid\gpt.ini from a domain controller and was not successful. Group Policy settings may not be applied until this event is resolved. This issue may be transient and could be caused by one or more of the following:
a) Name Resolution/Network Connectivity to the current domain controller.
b) File Replication Service Latency (a file created on another domain controller has not replicated to the current domain controller).
c) The Distributed File System (DFS) client has been disabled.”

When trying to open \\domain.example.com\SYSVOL in the file brower, a prompt to enter credentials or an “Access is denied” error message would be displayed.

Like suggested in the Karen Kane Womens Zig Zag Stripe Brigitte Dress Dress, disabling the “Hardened UNC paths” feature that was introduced with KB3000483 fixed these issues, but obviously this is not a solution because this will actually reintroduce the vulnerability (MITM-attack on SYSVOL share) that was addressed by KB3000483.

After some time, I realized that these problems had first appeared after installing the June security updates, so I looked through the corresponding knowledge base articles and found Karen Neuburger Womens Womens Pajamas Set Pj Pajama Set. This article actually mentions (some of) the issues described earlier in the “Known issues in this security update” section. It also offers a different workaround that works without disabling the “Hardened UNC paths” feature: Setting the “SmbServerNameHardeningLevel” to 0. However, using this workaround has other security implications (described in an Karen Scott Womens Knit Cardigan Sweater). Last but not least, MS15-083 describes a third workaround that involves disabling version 1 of the SMB protocol on the server, but this workaround did not solve the problem for me.

Changing the “SmbServerNameHardeningLevel” to 0 might not work when this setting is reset by a group policy (as it was in my case). In this case, the corresponding group policy needs to be changed and the “Computer Configuration\Windows Settings\Local Policies\Security Options\Microsoft network server: Server SPN target name validation level” option needs to be set to “Off”.

At first, I was surprised, but after writing a small program, that checks for the IFF_MULTICAST flag in the interfaces attributes, I realized that the interface in fact does not support multicasts (or at least says so).

As it turns out, virtual interfaces added to an Open vSwitch bridge do not support multicasts in older versions of Open vSwitch (Ubuntu 14.04 LTS ships with Open vSwitch 2.0.2). I cannot tell for sure, in which version muticast support has been added. Looking at the changelog, it looks like this is present since Open vSwitch 2.4.0. Anyway, the version of Open vSwitch shipped with Ubuntu 16.04 LTS (Open vSwitch 2.5.0) supports multicasts on virtual interfaces and the IFF_MULTICAST flag is set for those interfaces.

This means that radvd should not have any problems when using an Open vSwitch virtual interface on Ubuntu 16.04 LTS.

I wanted to use a custom stylesheet when building the Javadocs of all modules of a multi-module Maven project, so I generated a JAR that contained the stylesheet file, added it to the dependencies of the plugin and referenced it in the <stylesheetfile> tag.

I checked everything, tried various ways to configure the dependency, etc., but I could not get it to work. So I resorted to the last thing one can do when a software does not work as expected. I grabbed the source code of the plugin, found the relevant part that generated the message, and attached to the Maven process with a debugger. As it turned out, the problem was actually caused by a bug in the plugin that lead to resources from dependencies not being resolved correctly.

I filed a bug report and attached a patch to the bug report that fixes the problem for me. I hope that this patch will soon make it into a release version of the plugin. Until then, maybe this article helps someone else by saving the time to look for the cause of the issue.

Two days ago, I realized that one of our RADIUS servers was not working correctly any longer. I could not tell how long this problem had existed (the second RADIUS server still worked and in monitoring the primary one also worked, so the problem went undetected for a very long time).

After looking for the cause of the problem for quite some time, I remembered the problem described earlier and tried an old kernel version. Bingo! This fixed the problem. After looking at the changelog of the current 3.13 line kernel from trusty-proposed (that also fixes the problem) I found a reference to Kasper Womens Pinstripe 1 Button JKT with Notched Collar Blazer that describes the problem (don't be fooled by the bug's description, it also applies to IPv4).

As it turns out, the first regression had been caused by backporting an optimization regarding UDP checksum calculation from a newer Linux kernel. However, this change exposed a problem that had been fixed in the newer kernel but not in Ubuntu's branch of kernel 3.13. This regression was fixed by simply removing the patch again. This was okay because it was just an optimization.

Some time later, someone (who obviously was not aware of this regression) again thought that backporting the optimzation was a good idea, so it got reintroduced in 3.13.0-69. Now, it looks like they fixed the bug in 3.13.0-78 by actually fixing the underlying problem and not by removing the patch again. Therefore, I hope that we will not see the regression a third time. However, I am a bit annoyed that they did not do better testing when backporting the patch after there had already been a regression around it once. Maybe the Ubuntu team's decision to not use a kernel with long-term support and do maintenance themselves was not so wise after all.